Posts Tagged 'San Jose'

As I write this post, I'm finishing my first week as an employee with SoftLayer. It might seem premature, but I think it's safe to say that it's the best job I've ever had. My friend Marcos gave me a great reference to get my foot in the door at SoftLayer in San Jose (SJC01) as a Server Build Technician (SBT), and I owe him a LOT for that help. Because first impressions are usually pretty significant, I thought I'd take a few minutes share my short experience with the company to provide a bit of perspective to anyone interested in "what it's really like" to work at SoftLayer.

To give you the best picture of what it's like to work at SoftLayer, I have to start with the other SLayers I've met. So far, my coworkers and supervisors have been easy to get along with, and they clearly know their stuff. SoftLayer's "Challenging, but not Overwhelming" motto isn't just for show ... I've got a long way to go to catch up with my peers when it comes to knowledge about the data center, but everyone around me has been so supportive that it doesn't feel too intimidating. The work environment is very casual, and while the tasks at hand are all serious, my coworkers are always telling jokes and fostering a friendly and welcoming work environment.

The second aspect of the job I should focus on is the day-to-day responsibilities I'm learning how to perform. In the data center, we're responsible for building and performing hardware maintenance on all of our customer servers, and a lot of our customer interaction is done via tickets. When a ticket is added to our data center queue, it's pretty wild to see an SBT claim it quickly and immediately spring into action. If a customer orders a new server in our facility, and that server configuration isn't readily available, we get notified, and we have to move quickly to make a hardware change so the server can get provisioned in under four hours. That's been my favorite part of the job so far.

I've always enjoyed putting computers together, so being able to do it on such a large scale (and having the chance to do it a few times per day) is a thrill for me. Even though I've built more than my share of computers in my lifetime, I still find myself learning a lot from the processes and procedures Softlayer has in place. It's pretty cool to see the inventory of high-power server hardware we have in our spare parts room, too.

Being new to a job usually involves a span of time where you feel like a "new guy," but that hasn't been the case at SoftLayer. The crew here at SJC01 has made me feel at home quickly, and they've been patient and helpful when I've had any questions. In fact, as I'm thinking about it, I can't say anything negative about my experience so far with Softlayer.

I'm excited about integrating into the team, and given how much my coworkers hang out during lunch, breaks and after work, I'm sure that'll happen quickly. I want to put on a big office potluck where I can bring down my barbecue grill and cook for them some afternoon ... And given SoftLayer's love of BBQ, I'd imagine that would be a big hit.

Cheering for the hometown team has always been interesting at SoftLayer. With U.S. data centers in Dallas, Houston, Washington DC, Seattle and San Jose, the "home team" varies throughout the organization. It's always fun to talk about games with fans when I'm not invested in the outcome of a game outside my favorite team's division ... And when it comes to the NBA (which no longer has a team in Seattle), it's easy to cheer for the teams that other SLayers are cheering for. When the Dallas Mavericks won the NBA Championships, our Dallas techs were going crazy, and their enthusiasm was pretty contagious.

When it comes to NFL football, things are a little different. Prior to the launch of our San Jose facility, supporting each data center's home NFL team with some playful banter was normal. When San Jose came into the mix, that meant we'd have a lot of new employees (Yay!) who are probably going to be fans of my Seahawks' divisional rivals, the San Francisco 49ers (Booo! :-)). Now cheering for games gets a little trickier since we don't want a football-related civil war between offices.

In reality, I'm sure it'll never be an issue, since SLayers are like a big, diverse family ... That being said, I'm glad I wasn't in the office on the Monday after the Seahawks' opening game loss against the 49ers. My California peers would have probably been quick to chat about the game, and I probably wouldn't have wanted to talk about it. It's different for me to have coworkers who are die-hard fans of a rival team due to their geography (and not just because they are a bandwagon fan), and as we keep growing, I'm sure the football support between offices is going to keep getting more and more diverse ... My vote is that we avoid adding a data center in another NFC West rival's market, though.

The interoffice atmosphere is just another reason why I love working for SoftLayer. Our team is so different, but we're united by the common goal of making SoftLayer the best company in the world (for our customers and for our employees). For right now, I'm glad that there aren't as many soccer fans in our halls ... You don't want to see me in my soccer hooligan mode.

A few weeks ago, SamF posted "Before They Were SoftLayer Data Centers," a virtual scrapbook from the San Jose data center construction process, and based on the surge of traffic we saw to the post, our customers loved it. It's incredible to see an open warehouse-looking space transformed into an enterprise data center environment, and there's more amazingness where that came from.

In addition to the pre-"Truck Day" pictures we posted on the blog and in the San Jose DC Construction album on Flickr, we trained a video camera on a row in the data center to capture the cabling process.

What's so interesting about plugging in cables?

Consider the fact that each of the network switches we use in a rack has at least 48 ports. Now consider that each rack has two public network switches, two private network switches and one out-of-band management network switch that need to be connected to every SoftLayer server in the rack. That's 240 pre-measured network cables that need to be labeled and routed to specific heights in each rack ... without getting tangled and knotted up (see: behind your TV or under your computer desk).

The cabling process is so precise that if a single cable is out of place, the zip-tie on an entire bundle will be cut, and the process is started from scratch. The process is time-consuming, but the results speak for themselves:

Without further ado, here's the SJ data center team in action. The video is playing at 20x normal speed, and given the amount of time it takes to complete the cabling process for each rack, we enlisted the help of Spongebob SquarePants in our use of the "Two Hours Later" cut:

Ever wonder what a SoftLayer data center looked like before it became a SoftLayer data center? Each one of our facilities is built from a "pod" concept: You can walk into any of our server rooms in any of our facilities around the country (soon to be "around the world"), and you'll see same basic layout, control infrastructure and servers. By building our data center space in this way, we're able to provide an unparalleled customer experience. Nearly every aspect of our business benefits from this practice, many in surprising ways.

From an operations perspective, our staff can work in any facility without having to be retrained and the data center construction process becomes a science that can be replicated quicker with each subsequent build-out. From a sales perspective, every product and technology can be made available from all of our locations. From a network perspective, the network architecture doesn't deviate significantly from place to place. From a finance perspective, if we're buying the same gear from the same vendors, we get better volume pricing. From a marketing perspective ... I guess we have a lot of really pretty data center space to show off.

We try to keep our customers in the loop when it comes to our growth and expansion plans by posting pictures and updates as we build new pods, and with our newest facility in San Jose, CA, we've been snapping photos throughout the construction progress. If you've been patiently reading this part of the blog before scrolling down to the pictures, you get bonus points ... If you looked at the pictures before coming back up to this content, you already know that I've included several snapshots that show some of the steps we take when outfitting new DC space.

The first look at our soon-to-be data center is not the flashiest, but it shows you how early we get involved in the build-out process. The San Jose facility is brand new, so we have a fresh canvas for our work of art. If I were to start talking your ear off about the specifics of the space, this post would probably go into next week, so I'll just show you some of the most obvious steps in the evolution of the space.

The time gap between the first picture and the second picture is pretty evident, but the drastic change is pretty impressive. Raised floor, marked aisles, PDUs ... But no racks.

Have no fear, the racks are being assembled.

They're not going to do much good sitting in the facility's office space, though. Something tells me the next picture will have them in a different setting.

Lucky guess, huh? You can see in this picture that the racks are installed in front of perforated tiles (on the cold aisle side) and on top of special tiles that allow for us to snake cabling from under the floor to the rack without leaving open space for the cold air to sneak out where it's not needed.

The next step in the process requires five very expensive network switches in each rack. Two of the switches are for public network traffic, two are for private network traffic and one is for out-of-band management network traffic.

Those switches won't do much good for the servers if the servers can't be easily connected to them, so the next step is to attach and bind all of the network cable from the switches to where the servers will be. As you'll see in the next pictures, the cabling and binding is done with extreme precision ... If any of the bundles aren't tightly wound, the zip ties are cut and the process has to be restarted.

While the cables are being installed, we also work to prepare our control row with servers, switches, routers and appliances that mirror the configurations we have in our other pods.

When the network cables are all installed, it's a pretty amazing sight. When the cables are plugged into the servers, it's even more impressive ... Each cable is pre-measured and ready to be attached to its server with enough length to get it to the port but not too much to leave much slack.

One of the last steps before we actually get the servers installed is to install the server rails (which make installing the server a piece of cake).

The servers tend to need power, so the power strips are installed on each rack, and each power strip is fed from the row's PDU.

Every network and power cable in the data center is labeled and positioned exactly where it needs to be. The numbers on the cables correspond with ports on our switches, spots in the rack and plugs on the power strip so we can immediately track down and replace any problem cables we find.

If you've hung around with me for this long, I want to introduce you to a few of the team members that have been working night and day to get this facility ready for you. While I'd like to say I could have done all of this stuff myself, that would be a tremendous lie, and without the tireless efforts of all of these amazing SoftLayer folks, this post would be a whole lot less interesting.

A funny realization you might come to is that in this entire "data center" post, there's not a single picture of a customer server ... Is it a data center if it doesn't have data yet?